Scientific and technological production

Gatius Vila, MartaInternational Conference on Advances in Human-oriented and Personalized Mechanisms, Technologies, and Servicesp. 39-43Presentation's date: 2014-10-14Presentation of work at congresses

The incorporation of user models has become more popular in recent years. This paper describes how user models, domain ontologies and natural language generation techniques can be integrated to generate personalized questions and answers related to a particular scenario. For this purpose, a general organization of different types of knowledge involved is proposed, that facilitates its adaptation to different domains, user models and languages. In this proposal, the domain conceptual knowledge is represented by a domain ontology, that provides a framework for representing the user’s knowledge and interests. Ontologies provide a powerful formalism because they allow the representation of detailed descriptions of concepts, attributes and relations, thus facilitating richer inferences about user knowledge and interests. Additionally, in the approach presented, the domain concepts in the ontology are also related to a general syntactic-semantic taxonomy that facilitates the generation of more appropriate questions and answers for each user. The proposed organization has been applied for generating personalized questions and answers, that help the user when searching information about university courses.

This paper describes the use of a syntactico-semantic taxonomy to facilitate the generation of grammars for a multilingual web assistant. In particular, it describes the generation of grammars for two different domains: cultural events and medical specialists.

The aim of our research is to develop domain-restricted resources for web interaction supporting different languages: English, Hindi and Spanish. Many practical natural language systems use linguistic resources adapted to a specific domain because the processing is faster and more robust against errors. Besides, those grammars can be adapted to the
language used by different types of users. To facilitate the
process of generating linguistic resources for each domain and
language, we use ontologies representing the entities and
relations in a specific domain. The use of domain ontologies
also favors the integration of knowledge from several web sites.
For developing the grammar rules for each domain and
language, we use Grammar Framework, a powerful tool for
writing multilingual grammars that supports several alphabets. Our work is focused on the generation of assisting the user when accessing the web in two different scenarios: searching for information on cultural events and searching for a new medical specialist.

Dialogue systems can be used for guiding the users accessing web services, enhancing the web usability. However, they are expensive to develop and difficult to adapt to different types of web services. The knowledge model of a
web service can be seen as the basis to define the semantics of
the information to be exchanged among the components of a dialogue system. This approach facilitates the integration of
the different types of knowledge involved in human-machine communication and provides a unified framework easier to apply to new web services. Furthermore, the representation of the web service knowledge according to an ontology can enhance the reasoning capabilities of the underlying system.
This article describes the use of domain ontologies in a mixed-initiative web dialogue system for improving both its adaptability and its collaborative ability.

Los sistemas de diálogo se pueden ver como una interfaz de usuario para acceder a otras aplicaciones. No sólo tienen que tratar con los requerimientos de los usuarios, sino también con los propios de las aplicaciones. Este trabajo se centra en cómo representar y gestionar las tareas para dos tipos de servicios web: transaccionales y búsqueda de información. Los servicios transaccionales suelen ser simples de gestionar, excepto cuando el usuario desconoce el signi cado de los parámetros que el sistema le pide. Los sistemas de búsqueda, en cambio, necesitan estrategias mucho más complejas para acceder a las aplicaciones y mostrar los resultados. De ahí la necesidad de sistemas que guíen al usuario para que pueda acceder de manera fácil a la información. En nuestra propuesta, las especi caciones de las tareas se utilizan para determinar cuándo y cómo obtener más información del usuario, y cómo presentar los resultado de forma clara. // Dialog systems can be seen as user interfaces to access other applications.
They have to address the user needs, as well as the requirements of the applications. This work is concerned with the representation and the management of the application tasks. We have studied two types of web services: form- lling and information-seeking. We claim that dialogue systems may not intend to use the same strategies for all types of applications. Form- lling applications do not need assistants, but explanations about the meaning of the elds. Information-seeking engines need complex strategies to access and display results, and hence assistants may guide the user to give the query constraints. In our proposal, the task models we describe are used to determine how to acquire more reliable constraints from the user and how to adapt them in order to obtain more suitable results; as well as the most appropriate presentation of results.

This paper describes how we approach the
problem of guiding the user when accessing
informational web services. We developed a
mixed-initiative dialogue system that
provides access to web services in several
languages. In order to facilitate the adaptation
of the system to new informational web
services dialogue and task management were
separated and general descriptions of the
several tasks involved in the communication
process were incorporated.

In this paper, we study how the performance and usability of web dialogue systems could be enhanced by using an appropriate
representation of the different types of knowledge involved in communication: general dialogue mechanisms, specific domainrestricted linguistic and conceptual knowledge and information on
how well the communication process is doing. We describe the experiments carried out to analyze how to improve this knowledge representation in the web dialogue system we
developed.

Gatius Vila, Marta11 Conference on the European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics.
Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning for Language ProcessingPresentation's date: 2006-04-03Presentation of work at congresses

Gatius Vila, Marta; Gonzalez Bermudez, Meritxell11 Conference on the European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics.
Workshop on Knowledge and Reasoning for Language Processingp. 12-19Presentation of work at congresses

This paper describes a proposal to improve the communication process and the engineering features in VoiceXML dialogues. This proposal is focused on the efficient and reusable representation of the knowledge involved in communication. In order to achieve a good dialogue design we propose the explicit representation of the conceptual information the application needs form the user in an ontology. A syntactic-semantic taxonomy is provided to facilitate the generation of the grammars and the system's messages. Using this separate, reusable
knowledge organization, VoiceXML dialogues for different applications and in different languages can be generated semi-automatically.